Council wants safer, cleaner Escondido

ESCONDIDO  Restoring Escondido’s image as a safe city, cleaning up rundown neighborhoods, and devoting more money to street paving were among the priorities established by City Council members this week.

The council also set some other goals, including a stingier policy for using city reserves and expansion of the “targeted” policing that helped clean up Grape Day Park this winter.

No action was taken at the council’s four-hour brainstorming session Wednesday afternoon, but city employees said they will craft the priorities into an “action plan” for the council to approve this spring.

The council has held such meetings, which aim to set an agenda for the next two years, shortly after each general election since the 1990s.

Council members stressed Wednesday that their No. 1 priority remains job growth and economic development, the main focus of the action plan established in 2011.

They said that goal dovetails well with the new priorities set Wednesday.

Council members also agreed that the city should renew its pursuit of a luxury downtown hotel and try to become a charter city in 2014. But they chose to keep those goals separate from the new action plan so the document could have a narrower focus.

Making the city look better was the common theme of the new goals, with council members complaining that chopped-up streets, graffiti and rundown urban neighborhoods are holding the city back.

City Manager Clay Phillips said he planned to revive an aggressive code enforcement program that cracked down on graffiti, illegal garage conversions and unkempt landscaping between 2006 and 2009.

Council members said those efforts would help make the city safer and improve its image. But they also endorsed boosting police officer pay to help fill more than 20 open positions, placing many more security cameras on city property, and expanding the use of targeted policing.

Councilman Ed Gallo was particularly enthusiastic about the security cameras, suggesting that the city could pay for them by eliminating its money-losing red-light camera program.

Targeted policing could help clean up the city’s flood control channel, Washington Park or other areas, council members said.

Crime and homelessness are sharply down in Grape Day Park this winter due to an aggressive campaign that includes loud classical music, tree trimming, extra police patrols and policies discouraging donations.

“It’s very effective when you focus on a particular area,” Phillips said.

Another priority will be devoting millions to road maintenance and paving, which the city has neglected in recent years because of dwindling tax revenues during the recession.

Phillips said the city’s past decisions to maintain its roads at the lowest acceptable standard was shortsighted. He said the city’s approach makes repairs as much as 10 times more expensive.

The council also asked Phillips to create a “25/25” reserve policy, setting $25 million as the minimum level of city general fund reserve and 25 percent as the minimum percentage that the reserve should be of the city’s annual budget.